President Donald Trump has delivered what he says is “the most important speech of his presidency”- a 46-minute diatribe against Joe Biden’s election victory.
Trump, who spoke from the Diplomatic Room, kept up his futile pushback against the election even as state after state certifies its results and as Biden presses ahead with shaping his Cabinet in advance of his inauguration on Jan. 20.
Critics say the address, released only on social media and delivered in front of no audience, was largely a recycling of the same litany of misinformation and unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud that he has been making for the past month.
Biden received a record 80 million votes compared to 74 million for Trump. The Democrat also won 306 electoral votes compared to 232 for Trump. The Electoral College split matches Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton four years ago.
Trump dug further into his contention of a “rigged election” even though members of his own administration, including Attorney General William Barr, say that no proof of widespread voter fraud has been uncovered. Courts in multiple battleground states have thrown out a barrage of lawsuits filed on behalf of the president.
The president said the election results should be “overturned immediately” in several battleground states and suggested the Supreme Court should intervene in his favor, saying, “Hopefully, they will do what’s right for our country because our country can’t live with this kind of an election.”
“The constitutional process must be allowed to continue. We are going to defend the honesty of the vote by ensuring that every legal ballot is counted and that no illegal ballot is counted,” Trump said.
About an hour after it was posted, Trump’s video had been viewed hundreds of thousands of times on Facebook and shared by more than 60,000 Facebook users, according to data from CrowdTangle. Both Facebook and Twitter flagged the president’s posting, with Twitter noting that Trump’s claims about election fraud are disputed.